Sarkozy's war

French President Nicolas Sarkozy assumed office with a promise to turn France firmly back toward the Atlantic, a cowboy persona and a not-so-affectionate nickname: “Sarko the American.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, is regularly dinged by critics for not embracing his inner cowboy enough and for having a preference for multi-lateralism that sounds, to Republicans, well ... a little too European for comfort.

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Now Sarkozy stands at the fore of a coalition of the willing battling Col. Muammar Qadhafi in Libya, where French planes fired the first shots Saturday. And while the U.S. is providing military heft, Obama has gladly surrendered the limelight and, perhaps, a measure of control to a French leader with very different ambitions and interests.

“France has decided to assume its role, its role before history,” Sarkozy announced, as his country’s warplanes opened the attack on Qadhafi’s forces.

And from that moment on, in a very real way, Obama was betting the success of this unexpected and controversial North African intervention on the constancy and competence of a French colleague who could hardly be more different than the deliberate and cautious former senator from Illinois.

Sarkozy’s stamp on the conflict has been unmistakable. Cable news in the U.S. on Monday featured the celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, an unexpected Sarkozy ally, barking praise for the French president at a CNN anchor and elated Libyan opposition fighters shouting, “Merci, Sarkozy.”

And Sarkozy was indeed a central force in goading the world to act. “Sarkozy has a huge investment in seeing Qadhafi go,” said Justin Vaisse, the director of research for the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings in Washington. “He’s going to be a constant force in favor of hardening the stance and the action.”

But while Sarkozy’s zeal may have been helpful in rousing an international coalition to intervene, that passion could cause headaches in Washington. The American efforts to limit and clearly define the effort to stop Qadhafi in his tracks and — leaders hope — end his rule may well depend on the decisions of the impulsive Sarkozy, for whom Libya is both a crisis in his backyard and, analysts say, a political opportunity.

One central difference between Paris and Washington is the issue of geography. Libya may be a strategic interest for the United States, but a crisis there presents a more immediate challenge to France and other European countries, which buy Libyan oil and gas and fear yet another wave of North African refugees.

“What Sarkozy saw was that Qadhafi has leverage that could make him horribly troublesome for everyone — energy, inmmigration, terrorism,” Vaise said. “And these would be directed at the Europeans, not the Americans.”

But Sarkozy also has an opportunity to recapture some of the international glory that has marked the high points of his presidency and restored France’s sense of its ability to punch above its weight, as when he negotiated a 2008 ceasefire between Russia and Georgia. That image of international command, central to the narrative of his rise to power, had suffered badly this year when he was forced to fire his foreign minister for her close ties to a Tunisian dictator whose fall Sarkozy’s government largely overlooked.

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Naira Ruiz @ 03/22/2011 12:31 PM
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the French news site Rue89 and inaccurately attributed a quotation from Rue 89’s Pierre Haski.